Twitter, Twitter, Twitter!

Word has it Twitter might buy Summize, a really useful Twitter search tool.

And despite a higher number of outages in the past coupla weeks, visits to Twitter nonetheless grew 500 percent for the week ending July 5 compared to the same time last year, says Hitwise.

Plurk and FriendFeed continue to fight the good fight, but they're swimming uphill against the microblogging first-to-marketer: Twitter beats both with 12 and 24 times higher traffic, respectively -- yeah, even if their services are more reliable in terms of up-time.

If Friendster's watching right now, it's probably sighing, "I remember when I was the prettiest girl at the party." Yeah, things change fast.